


Between Silences

by madnessandbrilliance



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Homesick Lance (Voltron), Insomnia, Kind of homesick Keith too tbh, Lance (Voltron) in Denial, M/M, Pining Keith (Voltron), Post-Arus but Pre S3, Pre-Slash, Sharing a Bed, Sleepy Cuddles, So probably some time around s2?, but like. subtle pining keith, mild PTSD, opening up to each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:47:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21599353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madnessandbrilliance/pseuds/madnessandbrilliance
Summary: “I used to sleep with my siblings whenever we couldn’t sleep,” Lance blurts out instead. His face goes red immediately, and his hand shoots up to scratch at his neck.  Keith stares at him with a single raised eyebrow. “Uh—it helped, us, I guess—like. Not feel alone, or whatever.” He gives a nervous laugh.Keith steps back a little, brows furrowing again, and Lance wants to drown himself in food goo or something. “I’m not your sibling, Lance,” he says, looking at his crossed arms. Of course not, Lance wants to joke away, none of my siblings would have hair as bad as yours. But there’s a strange vulnerability in Keith’s statement, in the fold of his shoulders and downturn of his gaze. It shifts the weight of it into something heavier, more meaningful.I wasn’t offering, Lance could say. But that would be a lie, too.__Lance's isn't used to the silence of space. Neither is Keith. In a time where they're still getting to know one another, they find comfort in each other.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 32
Kudos: 373





	Between Silences

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wonderfulwaytooweird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wonderfulwaytooweird/gifts).

> Thank you [Alex](https://twitter.com/_ouid_) for this sweet commission... I won't lie I've been wanting to write a little something canon-compliant, so I really had a blast with this little oneshot.

One of the hardest things about space is the silence.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to Lance that an infinite, lifeless expanse was as devoid of sound as it is anything else. With billions of lightyears stretching between inhabited planets and nothing but cold, empty cosmos dividing them, the deafening silence s an expected thing.

It doesn’t make it any less difficult to deal with.

Lance likes to fill silence. He’s loud—he knows that. A little obnoxious. A lot dramatic. In a house never lacking sound, you had to learn to make noise in order to be heard. Somehow, that makes the quiet all the more painful.

“ _ Este niño lindo que nació de día… _ ”

Lance turns a corner of the steel-toned hallways, hands shoved into his pockets. Even the castle-ship, with all its developed Altean technology, barely makes any sound. The white noise he was used to at home, on Earth—air conditioning, fans whirring, gas humming—it doesn’t exist here. With the lights dimmed to replicate a typical planetary light cycle and everyone asleep, it’s like walking through a graveyard.

“… _ Quiere que lo lleven a la dulcería… _ ”

His humming is swallowed by the oppressive quiet and the sound of his own steps. Normally he wouldn’t be wandering around this late. After the corrupt castleship fiasco, being alone in the sterile, hollow rooms forces shivers down the back of his neck. Solitude, like silence, makes him wary.

He finds himself standing in the doorway of the bridge. Without Allura there to power all the holographic controls, the room stands cavernous and gaping. Arching over his head, millions of blank white stars twinkle through the glass. Lance drifts in, head tilted back to study the sky.

The last time he was in this room and homesick, he got blown up by a bomb. The thought makes him snort––a short, harsh sound, even as the small of his back itches with phantom burns.

“ _ Este niño lindo que nació de noche _ …”

“Lance?”

Hand shooting to his hip as if to draw his bayard, Lance whips around to face the doorway. The phantom burn on his spine flares. He swallows his sharp inhale, then chokes on the sigh of relief that escapes him at the sight of Keith in the doorway.

Keith isn’t wearing his stupid cropped jacket or even his gloves, and he looks confused to find Lance standing there. “What are you doing here?”

Lance straightens. He flexes his hand at his side as though it doesn’t feel empty without his rifle. ( _ You’re a soldier now _ , a voice whispers in his head.) “Might ask you the same thing, Mullet.” His voice doesn’t shake, though his fingers do. “Don’t you have better things to do at baloney-o-clock at night than sneaking up on me?”

In and out. Lance breathes away the momentary panic as the deflection works: Keith bristles at the tone in Lance’s voice. “I was just asking,” Keith snaps. “You’re the one skulking around the bridge when you should be asleep.” Like clockwork, he crosses his arms. Lance mirrors him.

This is good, bickering with Keith. It’s familiar. It fills empty silences and smothers the echoes of bombs and questions of making it home. “ _ I  _ should be asleep? What does that mean  _ you _ should be doing, huh?”

“None of your business!”

“Then it’s none of  _ yours _ what I’m doing!”

The two fall silent, glaring at each other. Lance’s heart rate hasn’t slowed down—it never does around Keith—but his hands no longer shake. Keith suddenly lets out a  _ tch _ and turns, stalking to the other side of the bridge like he can’t be bothered to keep dealing with Lance. It pricks at something deep in Lance’s chest, but he can’t let that show—he refuses to— so he storms to the opposite end of the bridge and flops to the floor with a grunt.

The room is silent again. Lance pulls at the collar of his shirt and glances out of the corner of his eye. Keith is staring up at the starry ceiling, arms folded over his knees and a frown tugging down the corner of his mouth. His thick brows are pulled over his eyes, and Lance knows if he were looking at him from the front there would be a wrinkle between them, like Keith always gets when he’s frowning.

He turns his gaze back to the front so quickly his vision blurs for a moment.

Minutes pass. Lance studies his fingers, then the stars in front of him, then the stars overhead. It might be only a few minutes since he walked into the room, or an hour. Something about the space feels mildly surreal, like he woke in up in a dream and none of this is really happening. He isn’t really sitting in the bridge of a giant alien castle spaceship, one-fifth of a ten-thousand-year long mega robot, a gazillion miles from home, and only a few feet away from his self-proclaimed rival.

Except he can’t sleep. So it’s not a dream.

“It’s too quiet.”

Keith’s voice breaks the muffled quiet, the first sound Lance has heard that he hasn’t made himself.

Lance glances over at him in surprise. Keith’s head is down, gaze forward. As if he feels Lance looking at him, he turns to fix Lance with a stubborn look. “The castleship. It’s too quiet. That’s why I’m here.”

Oh. Lance opens and closes his mouth for a moment. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting—maybe that Keith was looking to do some midnight training or whatever, that seems like him. He always figured Keith  _ liked _ quiet; he’s certainly always telling Lance he’s too loud.

“I’m not used to it,” Keith continues, his voice low. His thumb rubs over the knuckle of his forefinger, like an afterthought. “The desert—it’s always full of noise at night. Cicadas and owls, coyotes howling, crickets. It sounds alive. The castleship, it doesn’t sound like that. It sounds—”

“Empty,” Lance finishes. Something in him unfurls at the quiet confession from Keith. Vaguely, it occurs to him that this is unlike Keith, unlike him, unlike  _ them _ . They don’t share things like this, thoughts and feelings. But—

But there’s a blanket over them, an invisible bubble from reality that shields them from the prickling reality of their dynamic during waking hours. The moment feels ephemeral, fleeting. Lance can hear his sister’s voice, laughing in his ears.  _ Nothing is real during the witching hour, Leandro _ .

Keith must feel that too.

Without prompting, Lance licks his lips and continues. “My house was never quiet. There were too many people in it all the time. If the TV wasn’t on then there was music, or my siblings and I were sneaking around and getting into trouble. Even at night the ocean was right outside, with the waves making all this background noise. I don’t—I’m not—”

“Yeah.” Keith seems to know Lance can’t finish. Silence falls between them again, but it’s different, less smothering.

“I wouldn’t’ve guessed you didn’t like the quiet.”

“You guess a lot of things wrong about me, Lance.” Keith doesn’t say it angrily, just matter-of-fact, but Lance still winces a little.

“Heh. Probably. I’m kinda dumb.”

He feels more than sees Keith shift to his feet and dust himself off. Lance looks up at him with wide eyes as Keith strides over and looks down at him. He holds his hand out; Lance’s eyes go a little crossed trying to look at it.

“You aren’t dumb,” Keith says, soft. Lance takes Keith’s hand and lets Keith pulls him up until Lance is looking down those couple of inches at him again. Keith’s hand in his brings a faint, cloudy memory in the back of his mind that he shoves down viciously. Keith looks at where their hands are joined. It takes him a moment to let Lance’s hand go. When he does he looks up at Lance with a resigned look in his eyes. “Just kind of an idiot.”

They don’t speak on the walk back to their rooms. Somehow, the sound of Keith’s steps echoing in time with his makes Lance feel less lonely. The blanket of intimacy from the late hour, the quiet halls, persists even as they arrive. Keith’s room is first: they both pause in front of the door.

“Well.” Lance shuffles his feet. His door is less than ten feet away, but the idea of going into an empty, bare room and listening to the deafening silence seems highly unappealing. Lance almost wishes he could’ve stayed at the bridge, but being there alone wasn’t a nice idea either. It dawns on him that being alone anywhere sounds awful.

“We have an early day tomorrow,” Keith offers, like Lance doesn’t already know. “Allura’s gonna be pissed if we both show up tired.”

“Yeah.”

“So…” Keith seems to be waiting for Lance to say something—probably “good night” like a normal human being.

“I used to sleep with my siblings whenever we couldn’t sleep,” Lance blurts out instead. His face goes red immediately, and his hand shoots up to scratch at his neck. Keith stares at him with a single raised eyebrow. “Uh—it helped, us, I guess—like. Not feel alone, or whatever.” He gives a nervous laugh.

Keith steps back a little, brows furrowing again, and Lance wants to drown himself in food goo or something. “I’m not your sibling, Lance,” he says, looking at his crossed arms.  _ Of course not _ , Lance wants to joke away,  _ none of my siblings would have hair as bad as yours _ . But there’s a strange vulnerability in Keith’s statement, in the fold of his shoulders and downturn of his gaze. It shifts the weight of it into something heavier, more meaningful.

_ I wasn’t offering _ , Lance could say. But that would be a lie, too.

Nothing is real in the during the witching hour, anyways.

“Not at all,” Lance agrees, tone hushed and almost—almost afraid. Keith’s eyes flicker up at him. 

Lance braces himself for the rejection, powers himself up to let his feet pull away from this spot and take him to his room. Keith faces his door. Lance hears the slide of it as it opens. He turns.

“Are you coming or not?”

The rough tone of Keith’s voice—unsure, nervous—makes Lance’s head spin around. He’s standing just inside his room, looking at Lance as he holds the door open. Lance practically trips over himself following him in.

Keith’s room is even more bare than Lance’s. There’s Keith’s jacket hung neatly over a hook by the door, and an unmade bed, and that’s it. Lance turns away as Keith changes out of his clothes, ears burning. He sits gingerly on the edge of the bed. When he looks up, Keith is standing a few feet away, looking unsure.

Lance wishes he could joke like he always does, but again that invisible blanket presses down on him, shoves the nonsense down his throat and lifts a weird affection for Keith’s hesitancy into his chest. He slides back until he’s against the wall and lays down, pulling the blanket over himself. Keith still doesn’t move, so Lance lifts the edge of the blanket for him.

When Keith crawls in, it’s with a sweet sort of uncertainty. He’s stiff as he turns to his side, hands tucked under his cheek, facing Lance with wide eyes that flicker all over his face as if waiting for Lance to scream  _ sike _ and shove him off the mattress. Lance turns to his side too, so they’re face-to-face. There are still a few inches between them, but Lance feels the warmth emanating from Keith’s body like they’re touching.

“See?” Lance sighs. “This is good.”

Keith lets out a deep exhale through his nose. Lance slides forward a bit, until his foot touches Keith’s calf under the blanket; Keith twitches, but doesn’t pull away.

“I’m not. Used to this,” Keith admits, voice low. His cheek is squished a little over his hands. Lance can’t help it, he reaches out and pulls Keith’s hands from under his face. Like he was waiting for that to happen, Keith laces their fingers together.

“That’s okay,” Lance breathes. His eyes are starting to feel heavy, as though the lateness of the hour is hitting him all at once, propagated by the cinnamon-and-pine smell that floats around him. He shuffles closer until their hands are pressed between them, shutting his eyes.

If Lance is really still, he can still hear Keith’s quiet exhale, the soft shift of his body against the sheets. The silence isn’t overwhelming him anymore. Lance lets the arm not holding Keith’s hand drape itself over Keith’s waist. When Keith speaks again, his voice is a whisper against his collarbone.

“You gonna forget this too?”

A sleepy chuckle. “Probably.”

They fall asleep holding hands. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> A great big thank you to [Noble](https://archiveofourown.org/users/1004_Angel/pseuds/the-noble-idiot) and [Brigid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angstinspace/pseuds/angstinspace) for betaing <3 and [Kristine](https://twitter.com/kanonicity) for title help!
> 
> If you want to join me in screaming about Klance (among other ships) Feel free to follow me on my  
[VLD Twitter](https://twitter.com/sapphicsirena)! or on [Tumblr](http://madness-and-brilliancee.tumblr.com/)  
!
> 
> As always, please leave a kudos and a comment if you enjoyed-- even a :) means a ton!


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